“Unless you have a strong plan of what you’ll do with sensor data, it won't necessarily bring you value.”

Sonja Chirico Indrebø, SVP and CIO of Statoil

Image: Thomas Ekström

Share

Key learnings from an early adopter of IoT

Clare Simmons — April 2015

Statoil’s CIO Sonja Chirico Indrebø on the lessons learned from applying sensor technology across a range of environments.

The impact of the Internet of Things (IoT) is fast being felt across all industries and consumer markets, but within the oil and gas industry it is far from a new phenomenon. Norwegian energy giant Statoil has been utilizing sensor technology for decades, providing SVP and CIO Sonja Chirico Indrebø with some early — and deep — insight into the challenges and potential alike. And that extends to both the deployment of sensors and dealing with the vast amounts of data that they generate.

“What I’ve learned is that unless you have a strong plan of what you’ll do with sensor data, it won’t necessarily bring you value,” she explains. So while the method of data collection is important, for Indrebø “it’s all about finding that needle in the haystack” – and knowing what you’re looking for before data collection starts.

Planning what data to collect and how it will be exploited also makes it easier to disregard the mass of irrelevant data. For instance, most of the data picked up by Statoil’s seismic sensors is just noise, which must be filtered out in order to get to the data nuggets. Indrebø emphasizes that the underlying analytics architecture must be capable of evolving to take advantage of new opportunities and to avoid becoming stuck in a “data rut.”

“Our big data pool is enabling us to experiment with new ways of doing things.”

Environmental monitoring of its plants is just one example of the evolution in Statoil’s use of IoT and related data. “It shows how IT can do things differently” by finding new opportunities that complement the company’s sustainability goals, she says. And with its sustainability agenda now linked to every part of the business, IT is well-placed to support such efforts, given its underpinning role in delivering technology to all facets of the organization.

As Indrebø acknowledges, “it’s very easy for IT to tell the business what to do [with new technologies], to say, ‘we have something cool, why don’t you adopt it?’” But the IT team at Statoil works to show some best practice in data management itself before pushing it out to other business lines.

For instance, it has applied IoT technology by building its own Hadoop cluster, which is fed by information security data, including data gathered by security sensors. “We have an enormous amount of logs and systems that produce information, so we’ve gathered all these together as our own big data pool to experiment with new ways of doing things,” says Indrebø. For example, “We’re seeing forensic queries that used to deliver 400,000 responses within a second now delivering 8 million responses just as quickly.”Nothing standard

The range of environments involved in Statoil’s business may provide a wealth of new opportunities for IoT-generated data, but it can also complicate the provision of workplace solutions. Indrebø has to consider how to deliver IT services and support industrial activities that take place within on- and offshore plants, refineries and wind farms, as well as more standard office environments. The challenges stretch from trying to streamline office services by experimenting with a dedicated app store to ensuring that technology equipment in the industrial environment is blast-proof.

This means that, as CIO, Indrebø can rarely opt for a standard solution that is applicable across the entire company. “You have to make it fit for purpose,” she says. This points to an agile approach to new technologies. And while Statoil may have been an early adopter of IoT, the company feels it needs to “experiment and test to understand what could be the next big thing.”

CIO and SVP of Norway’s Statoil since 2011, Sonja Chirico Indrebø draws on deep domain expertise built over more than two decades in oil and gas IT. She joined the $81bn company as a senior offshore telecoms engineer in 1998, having begun her career at Aker Solutions.

Your choice regarding cookies on this site

Our website uses cookies for analytical purposes and to give you the best possible experience.

Click on Accept to agree or Preferences to view and choose your cookie settings.

This site uses cookies to store information on your computer.

Some cookies are necessary in order to deliver the best user experience while others provide analytics or allow retargeting in order to display advertisements that are relevant to you.

For a full list of our cookies and how we use them, please visit our Cookie Policy

Essential Cookies

These cookies enable the website to function to the best of its ability and provide the best user experience for you. They can still be disabled via your browser settings.

Analytical Cookies

We use analytical cookies such as those used by Google Analytics to give us information about the way our users interact with i-cio.com - this helps us to make improvements to the site to enhance your experience.

For a full list of analytical cookies and how we use them, visit our Cookie Policy

Social Media Cookies

We use cookies that track visits from social media platforms such as Facebook and LinkedIn - these cookies allow us to re-target users with relevant advertisements from i-cio.com.

For a full list of social media cookies and how we use them, visit our Cookie Policy